The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Open Cam­pus has an­nounced the Vale­dic­to­ri­an for its 2021 Vir­tu­al Pre­sen­ta­tion of Grad­u­ates Cer­e­mo­ny, which will be held on Sat­ur­day,at 4 pm via UWItv plat­forms.

The Vale­dic­to­ri­an is Ms Lau­ra Ra­moutar of the Open Cam­pus Coun­try Site, St Au­gus­tine. Lau­ra has sat­is­fied the re­quire­ments for the award of the Bach­e­lor of Ed­u­ca­tion in Ear­ly Child­hood De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Stud­ies with First Class Ho­n­ours. Apart from ob­tain­ing First Class Ho­n­ours, Lau­ra emerged as the Vale­dic­to­ri­an based on a rig­or­ous se­lec­tion process among five can­di­dates that in­clud­ed a video pre­sen­ta­tion and an in­ter­view.

Lau­ra’s pas­sion for ed­u­ca­tion is life­long. From as ear­ly as her teenag­er years, her pro­fes­sion­al goal was to be­come a pri­ma­ry school teacher. These am­bi­tions were tem­porar­i­ly de­layed as she pur­sued moth­er­hood and fo­cused on nur­tur­ing her chil­dren holis­ti­cal­ly.

“From my child­hood, I have man­i­fest­ed an un­wa­ver­ing and fiery pas­sion for teach­ing and learn­ing, com­bined with an in­nate de­sire to be of ser­vice to oth­ers,” she ex­plained.

When the youngest of Lau­ra’s three chil­dren en­tered pre-school, de­ter­mi­na­tion guid­ed her to­wards em­ploy­ment as a preschool teacher. In­creas­ing­ly mo­ti­vat­ed to ful­fil her life­long am­bi­tion, in 2018, Lau­ra ap­plied to The UWI Open Cam­pus to read for her de­gree. Si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, she com­plet­ed sev­er­al short cours­es at a lo­cal in­sti­tute in Trinidad and To­ba­go in or­der to en­hance her teach­ing com­pe­ten­cy. Cur­rent­ly, she sup­ports the learn­ing and de­vel­op­ment of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 70 chil­dren through an on­line tu­tor­ing ser­vice.

Hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed her un­der­grad­u­ate de­gree with the Open Cam­pus, Lau­ra’s goal is to se­cure a teach­ing po­si­tion in a pub­lic school as well as to pur­sue a mas­ter’s de­gree in In­clu­sive and Spe­cial Ed­u­ca­tion.

“Look­ing at my off­spring in­spires me to per­se­vere on my quest to cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties for the suc­cess of chil­dren in my coun­try,” Lau­ra said.

She in­tends to con­tin­ue pur­su­ing per­son­al de­vel­op­ment with the aim of pos­i­tive­ly in­flu­enc­ing the ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor and per­sist­ing in ser­vice to peo­ple.

“I con­tin­ue work­ing to­wards in­creas­ing the qual­i­ty of life of oth­ers and guid­ing all of my chil­dren to­wards be­com­ing the best ver­sion of them­selves,” the 2021 Vale­dic­to­ri­an stat­ed.

As is cus­tom­ary, Lau­ra will de­liv­er the Vale­dic­to­ry Speech at the Grad­u­a­tion Cer­e­mo­ny on be­half of her fel­low grad­u­ates from across the re­gion.